How Ohio's 'Use It or Lose It' Voter Purge Could Affect Other States

November's midterm elections are right around the corner. But in at least one state in the U.S., if you haven't voted in two years, you might be at risk of losing your registration and being turned away from the polls.

That's exactly the case in Ohio after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday (by a 5-4 vote) that the state could continue a process for purging inactive voters from the registration rolls—a move some believe will disenfranchise thousands.

Methods to keep updated voter registries varies from state to state. In Ohio, however, those who have not voted in a two-year period are sent a written notice by election officials. If they fail to respond and don't vote over the next four years, including in two more federal elections, their names are dropped from the list of registered voters, according to NBC News.

The specific case before the court involved a man name Larry Harmon, who voted in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections but skipped 2012 and the midterms in 2010 and 2014. When he went to vote on a ballot initiative in 2015, he found his name was no longer on the registry.

Previously, a federal appeals court ruled against Ohio and stated that approximately 7,500 voters had been wrongly removed from the registration rolls in the 2016 election.

Now the Supreme Court has overturned that ruling, and many are concerned about the disenfranchisement of voters in Ohio and other states who may model themselves after Ohio. (NBC News writes that "at least a dozen other politically conservative states said they would adopt a similar practice" if the ruling was overturned.)

The majority opinion came from Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote that it was not the court's job "to decide whether Ohio’s supplemental process is the ideal method for keeping its voting rolls up to date. The only question before us is whether it violates federal law. It does not."

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor strongly expressed her thoughts on the ruling. "In concluding that the Supplemental Process does not violate the NVRA, the majority does more than just misconstrue the statutory text. It entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate," she wrote. "States, though, need not choose to be so unwise. Our democracy rests on the ability of all individuals, regardless of race, income, or status, to exercise their right to vote. The majority of States have found ways to maintain accurate voter rolls without initiating removal processes based solely on an individual’s failure to vote."

"The Supreme Court got this one wrong. The right to vote is not 'use it or lose it,'" Chris Carson, president of the League of Women Voters of the United States, told NBC News. "This decision will fuel the fire of voter suppressors across the country who want to make sure their chosen candidates win reelection, no matter what the voters say."

There is evidence to suggest that a ruling of this nature will disproportionately affect minority and Democratic communities. A 2016 Reuters study showed that in Ohio's three largest counties that include Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus, voters have been struck from the rolls in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican neighborhoods. The analysis also found that neighborhoods that have a high proportion of poor, African American residents are hit hardest.

It remains to be seen exactly how the ruling will sway election results in the future, but with the November midterms just months away, it certainly takes on an even greater weight.

You can find more information on registering to vote (or confirming your registration), here.